You are correct. However, you could make your front page specials using HTML, and you could even create buy buttons with remote cart scripting. It wouldn't be automatic, but you would be able to make the look and feel of your home page change to whatever you please if you did it in this way. You would change the Site HTML > Message editor and Site HTML > News editor to do this.
In case you are not familiar with remote cart scripting, an article about it is located
here.